In my high stakes league a team posted a trade involving Rafael Furcal, so I took a closer look at Furcal. He was one of my main targets going into my auction; my auction plan involved me getting one of the group of Furcal, Reyes and Rollins as “Plan A” with various default positions depending on what happened. It just goes to show that you are better off being lucky than good. I got Rollins and not Furcal, but it could easily have gone the other way.

To date, Furcal has hit 1 HR. However aside from power it appears that the rest of his season is in line with what could reasonably be expected from his hitting. His SB are down also, with only 7 to date, which appears at this point to be a function of his opportunities; a 20-25 SB season is still within the realm of possibility with some offensive improvement. But can this be expected?

Currently, his line is as follows: 1 HR 25 RBI 7 SB .285/.352/.376, 89% contact rate, 9% BB rate, 32% hit rate, 0.93 walk/strikeout ratio. Shandler has his xBA at .269. The Hardball Times has his HR/F rate at a measly 1.5%; for the rest of his offensive line he is basically within career norms.

Here are his career norms for the various metrics in the last four years:

BB rate: range from 8-10%
Contact: 85%-89%
OBP: .346-.370
Hit Rate: 30%-33%
BB/K ratio: 0.74-0.82

Essentially, Furcal has a power dip, but the rest of his performance indicators are in line with his last few years.

What I found interesting was that the two main sources of projections I used going into my auction (namely BaseballHQ and Baseball Prospectus) were both very similar, but very different in one key respect. Here are the projections, which I will point out are also very similar to almost every other source I checked:

HQ: 15 HR 63 RBI 37 SB .300/.324/.393
BP: 10 HR 51 RBI 32 SB .275/.348/.400 (50th percentile PECOTA)

However Shandler has his Reliability Score as 99 out of 100; the highest possible. This is no real surprise given the consistency of Furcal’s metrics over the last four years. However BP had him with a 4% breakout rate and a whopping 39% collapse rate, namely that his equivalent runs would drop by 20% or more almost 40% of the time. This is a paradox; Shandler has him as very reliable, and BP has him as flopping 40% of the time. Both are my most trusted sources of projections. How to make sense of this??

Sometimes you can’t; even with a sample size of 200 AB we can have huge variations in performance. In fact, both projections appear that they could be correct, paradoxically. Shandler was correct in that his metrics would remain in line with career norms, and for the most part they have. But BP is right that he was looking at a significant possibility of collapse; 40% does not equal 100%. Both systems, looked at together appear to provide a case that he would simply be looking at the low end of his career norms. The BP collapse figure, if reached would still have him within his normal range. This is because his 2006 was buoyed by a .335 BA on balls in play.

Given the fact that his metrics are in line with what he has historically done over the last four years, it appears that Furcal is just simply primed for a bad year on the low end of his skill set but still within the normal range. Looking at these two projection systems together provides a strong case.